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At Lollapalooza, a war between music and images raged all weekend. One critic's experience.

For various kid-related reasons, this was my fourth Lollapalooza. Therefore it was my fourth reminder that concert-going at the annual, blobby yet extraordinarily slick Grant Park event (even the mud Sunday looked like the work of an army of fastidious art directors) turns into a collision between the acts themselves and the live concert footage designed to enhance the music.

Three days of music, food and thousands of fans. Take it all in with the help of Chicago Tribune photographers.

Lollapalooza 2014

Three days of music, food and thousands of fans. Take it all in with the help of Chicago Tribune photographers.

I’m conflicted. I suppose I appreciate the big video screens, especially from the back 40 or the fringes of the action. The close-ups of the fingers on the guitar, the panoramic visas of the skyline shot from the stage -- they're clichés so familiar, you visually hum them from memory.

Lollapalooza’s eight stages photograph well, from most any angle. So the style in which the music is filmed, while it’s being played, becomes the primary Lollapalooza experience for thousands and thousands of people.

This is nothing new for arena shows or most outdoor music concerts of a certain size. You watch the video. You don’t watch what’s happening on stage, unless you are very, very close to the action.

This weekend I hung around the smallish, shady Lollapalooza Grove stage every chance I could, without consciously realizing why until Sunday night.

The Grove had no video component. It was a stage, and a crowd. And the crowd was required to actually experience the thing as a thing unto itself, without the usual visual competition.

On larger stages, acts such as The Avett Brothers (at the Samsung stage, a monster) came with a massive video digital frame around the action. The fluidity and variety of stylistic tactics deployed to capture the concert visually were impressive. Quick cuts, longer shots, deft tracking shots from imposing low angles, snaking across the lip of the stage: The results looked like a PBS special, ready to air during the next pledge week.

Last month at the Pitchfork music festival, the July 19 headliner Neutral Milk Hotel said thanks, but no thanks. Enough. The band declined to allow their set to be video-captured. Therefore the audience experienced the music for what it was, not for the way the videographers insta-packaged it.

A great concert film (“The T.A.M.I. Show,” “Stop Making Sense”) lifts the music to another realm; good live-concert footage can approximate the same, on the fly. But when your eyes are being told too much, your ears have a way of shutting down.

Sunday night on the blessedly video-free Grove stage, the duo Darkside cast a spell with the help of a lot of stage fog, and some clever lighting, but mainly on the strength of the trancelike music. And that was more like it.

At the dawn of civilization — when people would buy concert tickets because they wanted to hear music, when the purchase of that ticket implied some degree of interest in the performers onstage — there was no under-butt.

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